i think almost every decision that made me hate burnout 3 by the end of it all stems from the lethality of everything. the thought process with the races, to keep "close racing" and not make new players feel too bad about sucking, was to stick an opponent 1 second behind you for the whole race until the last 30 seconds. it's less of a race and more of a "can you not die near the finish line" contest with 4 minutes of driving tacked onto the start.

knock on effect of that: cars don't really mean anything apart from a new model and texture. the only difference is maybe 5mph of top speed and having either usable handling or being part of the 10% of cars that are completely undrivable because they immediately lose grip. plus, you unlock all of the cars right at the end of the series anyway, so you get like 10 races in the starters + the assassin/modified cars and then maybe one each for the rest. why? you get to the points/takedown thresholds so quickly that you don't even get to care after the first act.

road rage and time trials are actually fun and the only part of the gameplay i was looking forwards to by the end, but because of the lack of difficulty in the races, they inflate the requirements for those as hard as they can. i spent years playing road rage on burnout legends on my psp so the thresholds there didn't affect me but getting perfect runs on 4 minute long tracks in the previews/special events... if i didn't have good luck on that event i would have ragequit forever

I can't complain about the graphics on the whole cause they're actually really well-done, maybe a little lackluster for such a high-budget game coming out in 04 but whatever. the issue with the graphics is trying to play this in the original 600x800 will destroy your eyes and your will to live, the lack of any blur or anything just makes the horizon a sea of disparate pixels that you have to pick out headlights from in order to not die.

honestly the structure of the campaign itself sucks too, you start off in the most painfully boring environment, then the last two are pretty great But they didn't even finish asia!!! why are there no point to points... point to point is the most fun in the game just because you can't anticipate the ending so easily and thus the rubberbanding isn't so painfully obvious. anyway they should have cut out like any of the "do the same race/road rage on the reverse version" events and the game would have been so much more tolerable

i didn't mention the crash events here because i don't like them and thus they're not factored into the score. i don't think i could sit through 90 of them and not go into a catatonic state

yeah it's fun in bursts if you do a couple hot laps or a road rage but revenge is like. actually fun to play through the career and everything. so why not just play that? i want to say legends is this but better but honestly it's been so long since i've played it. i do however know that the tracks are 1000x better and coming to this i was very disappointed that the only tracks from legends in here are the most boring ones (apart from winter city... that 270 degree turn in winter city i will always love you)

hilariously stupid mystery dungeon clone with a cool (on the surface, before you realise how dumb it is) gimmick of reversing status conditions to gain buffs. 5(?) enemies in the game total plus i think two bosses, one at level 50 and i assume the other is at 100.

most of the points here come from presentation, even if it's really repetitive the enemy and random dungeon designs all look pretty good (completely unimpressive technically, but whatever) esp for 2002 where the lower tier of developers were still figuring out how to make things not just look like hi-fi ps1 games. trying to see all the floor themes was probably the only reason i stuck around to floor 40 or so before sunk cost fallacy replaced that

Mechanically yeah it sucks you get fucked over with random status effects constantly. It's okay because the game lets you kinda just skip over things like this half the time. Stops you from grinding with weapon durability, but when you get cursed that equipment can't break and getting cursed is common enough that it'll happen to pretty much every weapon you get, save for anything left half-used or prematurely broken by enemies. and then you realise that grinding is useless and you just want to get possessed by spirits for all your level ups anyway. your health regen goes from being full health to full health minus one point. that stops you from using spheres to level up your max hp as efficiently. and it doesn't stack. that's the only debuff curses give you in exchange for a free level. so by the end i farmed like 10 levels in floor 48 and just hit the lv50 boss with a spear until it died. i was poisoned (bugged, you can have reversed poison and then somehow get poisoned on top of it and there's nothing you can do apart from set up all your buffs again. i didnt have the inventory space for debuff items.) and didn't even lose more than a third of my health by the end of the fight. you can save and quit at any point but it seems really janky it rerolls lighting and dungeon layout and enemy layout so i assume it rerolls treasure and thus is very exploitable. find that out for me please.

The first true roguelike i've played since i've been old enough to have a grasp of how video games work so it's getting a high rating just for doing what i assume it's biting off of better games that weren't made over a lunch break. I only assume this ends at level 100 there isn't a full playthrough in english or even japanese anywhere. it's a mystery how this even has a gamefaqs guide. theres some deep rooted desire in me to basically replay the whole game worth of floors just to see the true ending but really i can't torture myself any more than this. 6 hours of gameplay took me 6 days to make myself complete and i'll be catatonic by next month if i do 6 more! :D

i love tamsoft so theyre getting a 4

qix but the camera is zoomed way too far in, half the screen is taken up by things that will instakill you, and with the mushiest controls possible. you have 3 lives and they'll be gone in an instant, and when they are, you're back to the start. Plus the mystery box powerup has about a 75% chance of killing you.
I did a run abusing savestates cause the layout and lighting changed after level 10 but it just loops back to level 1 with more enemies after 19. it's such a pointless game that i don't really even need to write this but i feel compelled to just in case it saves someone 3 minutes downloading this off a rom site

however the music is so unnecessarily good that it gets an extra star. i couldn't get cube media player to interleave it properly so please someone who knows what they're doing please download this and rip it for me. i will pay you money